I haven't written about Miu since April.
Recently we had dinner at an Indian restaurant in Shiodome, where Japanese bellydancers came sashaying out (to the yelps of suit-clad salarymen sitting at another table) right in the middle of dessert.
Miu and I discussed sexual fetishes and how race comes into play although we weren't exactly sure what it meant.
"Pocahontas. Suzy Wong. Thomas Jefferson's slave," Miu, 16, said pensively.
"Nonwhite women are so used to feeling honored to be seen sexually desirable by the Opposite Sex at large but especially the white male."
The pasty stomachs of the dancers rolled around to the music as bells jangled and eyelashes fluttered.
"Does India even have bellydancing?" she asked exasperated.
Miu tells me she has made an important decision.
"I am never going to open up my legs to another white male ever," she announced.
"Race should not matter, but we are all products of history, and what we do can't be taken out of context of what people did before us because that's what's going on in people's heads."
I showed her a poem I wrote a long time ago. It was written tongue-in-cheek but she says the idea is disgusting, politically incorrect on so many fronts.
an ode to the Caucasian male
white man
white man
with the silky blond hair
the emerald-blue eyes
and the cool million dollar grin
I won't mind being a Suzy Wong for you.
cuz
I'm tired of the laundry-men
and the dirty restaurant cooks
who can only smell of won ton soup
and talk about chowmein
they don't have the powers,
the style you do
seems you've got to be white
to really be a man
the long sleek legs
with the acid rock walk
in the hot tight pants
where the warm prick dwells
it's okay
you see only the race in me
just a stereotype, not my personality
it's okay
cuz, white man
you have
whiteness
to give.
"I'm going to find me a boyfriend in Tokyo who is like Bruce Lee," Miu said.
First of all, Bruce Lee is from Hong Kong.
And I didn't even have the heart to tell her that Bruce Lee married a white woman, and supposedly wasn't 100 percent Asian himself.
It is sad, though.
Miu told me there was a guy she dated back in the U.S. who explained to her matter of fact that he had discovered Asian women had softer skin than did other races _ as though that was supposed to be a compliment.
About Me
- Yuri Kageyama
- Poet, writer in Tokyo. "The New and Selected Yuri _ Writing From Peeling till Now" Ishmael Reed Publishing Co. 2011. "Peeling" I. Reed Press. Poems, stories, essays in "Y'Bird" "Pow Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience _ Short Fiction from Then to Now" "San Francisco Stories" "On a Bed of Rice" "Konch" "Breaking Silence" "Greenfield Review" "Beyond Rice" "River Styx" "Other Side River" "Yellow Silk" "Stories We Hold Secret" "MultiAmerica" and other publications. Read with Ishmael Reed, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Geraldine Kudaka, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Russel Baba, Seamus Heaney, Shozu Ben, Winchester Nii Tete, Eric Kamau Gravatt, Takenari Shibata, Toshinori Takimoto, Teruyuki and Haruna Kawabata, Keiji Kubo, Yumi Miyagishima, Carl Freire, Abel Coelho, Yuri Matsueda. "Talking TAIKO" a film by Yoshiaki Tago documents her poetry. "A Back Alley Asian American Love Story of Sorts" by Niccolo Caldararo of her story was shown at the San Francisco and New York Asian American film festivals, won awards at the 1986 Palo Alto Film Festival, 1987 Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1988 Onion City Film Festival. Magna cum laude Cornell University, M.A. the University of California Berkeley.
2 comments:
All well and good. But what happens if the power is held by the Japanese woman, and she exploits it.
We all know how Japanese soldiers behaved in SouthEast Asia.
It happened to me in my marriage to a Japanese woman. We finally stopped having sex and she threw me out of the flat in the dead of winter.
I had nowhere to go.
It's a two-way street. Japanese women should stop grumbling and savour the superior sensibilities of Western men.
Generalizations tend to be stereotypes. And individuals should be treated as individuals. There is no such thing as a Western male sensibility any more than Race A or Race B characteristics. It is degrading to be perceived as the personification of an abstracted characteristic of a race. You aren't telling me that only Japanese women hold out on sex and throw out men they have fallen out of love with?
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